McAuley Sans Almost Everything

This book is a bird of most curious kidney. For the life of me I can’t see any raison d'etre for it. Not that James McAuley, with his wardrobe of fascinating hats, doesn’t cry out for a book, and not that Peter Coleman doesn’t have so many of the qualifications to write that book. But this work is not it. It’s thin, to the point of emaciation. It appears exactly four years after McAuley’s death, which, as literary biographies go, is but a day. Which puts me in mind of an Entebbe Raid or Teheran Hostages book, hitting the market while the event is still fresh. But McAuley’s career, for all its interest, lacks that brand of newsworthiness. And a book with so comprehensive a title as The Heart of James McAuley: Life and Work of the Australian Poet presumably aims to be more than a piece of ephemera.